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By Scott CanonM cCLATCHY NEWSPAPERS • Monday June 6, 2011 5:22 AM

Content providers still seek profit from Net -

KANSAS CITY, Mo. - The axiom about free lunches was tossed out by the Internet.

Web downloads have delivered all manner of no-pay music, news, movies and software. Years of
trying to put them behind a cash register have mostly failed.

Now, though, a new push is on to collect online cover charges to pay the musicians, journalists,
actors and code writers who make the content.

Notably,
The New York Times this spring started charging people who want unfettered access to its
work online. It has erected a "pay wall" - costing $1.88 to $4.38 a week, depending on how many
devices you want to read it on - and limited nonsubscribers to viewing 20 articles a month.

It's hardly the only daily newspaper to try. In Manhattan, Kan., and Santa Barbara, Calif., and
at Long Island's
Newsday and Little Rock's ArkansasOnline, dailies as long ago as 2001 have asked from $4
to $35 for monthly online subscriptions - just none with the wide reach of
The Times.

The Old Grey Lady is making a digital-age gamble: that money from online subscriptions from a
smaller audience will offset the smaller amounts of money made from online ads.

How well
The Times' experiment fares may signal whether other companies can move beyond advertising
as a source of online income.

Success depends on an endless number of variables, including whether the content is consumed on
a desktop computer or a smartphone, found on iTunes or the Android Market, produced by a blue-chip
brand or a startup.

Which companies can profitably erect virtual tollbooths, many analysts think, will turn on the
long-vexing problem of how easy it is to find similar content free and on making the payments
hassle-free.

"You get to this peculiar psychology of why people will pay you," said Ken Doctor, a media
analyst at Outsell Inc. and author of
Newsonomics: Twelve New Trends That Will Shape the News You Get.

"We're still figuring out what the answer is."

By April,
The Times was reporting 100,000 digital subscribers (lured partly by a 99-cent
introductory offer for the first month). Analysts think it will need five or 10 times that number
to make the paywall pay off.

Visits to
The Times' website dropped as much as 15 percent and page views fell as much as 30percent
after it throttled access for freeloaders in March.

Both loathed and esteemed,
The Times' brand stands alone for news. Success in charging for access - a question that
may take years to satisfy - doesn't necessarily mean that less-prominent media will have the same
brand power to sell online subscriptions.

Analysts are decidedly split on the way to profitability.

Well-regarded news organizations might be able to persuade readers that their content is more
than a commodity that's free across the Web and persuade them to pay, said Steve Outing, a media
analyst and director of the University of Colorado's Digital Media Test Kitchen. Or, he said, they
might not: "The jury's still out."

He sees entertainment media stumbling by not giving more options to buy their stuff a la carte.
Outing thinks cable networks that don't let people pay for downloads of their shows, for instance,
could be losing revenue and making the download of pirated material all the more inviting.

"You look back to what happened to the music industry in the early days of the Internet, and
it's pretty catastrophic," he said. "Part of it's because they waited so long to take advantage of
the digital media world and fought against it."

Others, like Amy Gahran, a founder of the news startup Oakland Local in California, said the
subscriptions and pay walls show a lack of imagination. She said advertising sold specifically for
Web pages - not as extras tacked on with print sales - or advertising aimed specifically at
cellphones could bring in more money. Pay walls, she said, will chase away more advertising dollars
than they will draw in subscriptions.

"Pay walls are stupid to the point of being suicidal," Gahran said. "That's only going to work
where you have highly specialized information that's not available anywhere else. General news
content - I don't care how good it is - is still a commodity."

Finding success in charging for what the Internet seems to make free won't be easy.

Songs especially, and movies increasingly, have become favored targets of digital pirates. Legal
or not, the free and easy is more alluring to people online than the things they must pay for.

The same extends beyond the world of file-swapping and downloads.
The Times, for instance, is far from the only source on wars and business and the
arts.

At the same time, Web aggregators such as the Drudge Report, Huffington Post and Google News
have emerged as power repackagers of the work of other organizations - in ways that sometimes
divert Internet traffic, and advertising potential, from the original source.

"
The New York Times party used to be free," comic Seth Meyers joked at the White House
Correspondents Dinner last month, "but tonight apparently there's a cover. So, like everyone else,
I'll probably just go to the Huffington Post party.

"And the Huffington Post party is asking people to go to other parties first and just steal food
and drinks and bring it from there."

Arianna Huffington, who created the website and sold it to AOL this spring for $315million,
contends that her aggregation draws traffic only because it's paired with original material (albeit
much of it from volunteer writers).

The websites that Huffington Post borrows from, she has said, gain extra traffic from links on
her website.